Re: Ada and Doxygen

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

"Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> writes:

> <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> a écrit:
>
>> Browsing is better for Ada in GPS or Emacs Ada mode; you can get to
>> _all_ of the source, not just what the Doxygen viewer has access to.
>
> If I may have a comment about a "detail" : while GPS provides some way
> to  travel across sources, this does not compare to a browsable set of
> document which are browsable by nature (is it the good word for the
> french  "par essence" ?) and where links are managed and edited as
> part of the  content, just like words and sentences are. 

I don't agree. 

What, exactly, is missing in Emacs Ada mode?

Actually, I have one item; an easy way to see the inherited operations
of a type. For example, the Qt manuals show that. I have no idea
whether the Qt manuals are produced by a tool.

If I were to use a tool to produce separate documentation for Ada
source code, I'd start with AdaBrowse
(http://home.datacomm.ch/t_wolf/tw/ada95/adabrowse/); it uses ASIS, so
it starts with all the information the compiler has.

> If the content of a document and its interpretation depends on the
> application you use to view it, then this is no more a document (I
> mean, links are not really part of this "document" and don't takes
> part of it). 

For a general "document", I agree. For Ada source code, a tool that
specifically understands the Ada syntax is better; that's what GPS and
Emacs Ada mode are - they use the cross index information output by
the GNAT Ada compiler.

> And indeed, it depends (after your example) on GPS or Emacs mode
> (this is inferred from the document, just like would be a list of
> words or an automatic index, which may not be meaningful.... because
> automatic)

I don't understand your point here.

> Further more, this kind of browsing does not allow pre-designed
> navigation  paths (this is mainly random browsing -- random here, has
> the same meaning  as with random file access), 

Well, yes. 

If you want to write a tutorial, that's a separate document, not
source code. 

> still because browsing in not a first property of sources, 

"Browsing" is heavily overloaded. A "source code browser" uses only
information in the sources to generate the browsing links; in that
case, I think it is fair to say "source code browsing information is a
first property of sources". Of course, Ada provides much better
browsing information than C or Assembler.

> and this will never be, because this does not have to be, just
> because documents and sources are different things with different
> purposes.

What is the list of requirements for this hypothetical browsing tool
you want to use?

-- 
-- Stephe